26 February 2008

Yes, well then, what do you think about the idea of these personal information filters. This idea that you can kind of make a personal profile, and the system will search Internet on the basis of this?

This is what I call the art of decimation...

Decimation?

Decimation. You kill only one person out of ten...

He gestures towards the well-filled bookshelves again.

The number of books that only concern my specific domain, not to speak of the other ones that I receive weekly certainly, exaggeratedly, overwhelms my reading...

Your capability, capacity?

...my capability, my time. If you have a certain experience you are able to... well, you can make a very random decimation. On this or that subject for instance, there may be no more than ten possible new ideas. It is rare that that is the case.

And the working hypotheses you make are based on these?

So .. if I read only one out of ten books, probably there will be an idea in there I can find, and if it is not there, then it will be in the next group of ten books that I pick up. But this is a very random thing.

But it is also very much based on your past experience, obviously?Oh, sure, it is random, but based upon past experience.

He reaches for a book from his desk and begins to thumb through it.

OK, now I am able to open this at the first page, to look at the summary, to see the bibliography and to understand if the fellow is reliable or not; if there is something new there or not. And since I have long experience, my decimation is oriented. I sense it is better that I read this, and not that etcetera.

So you are able in a way to recognise newness, or innovation?

In a way, in a way. I can commit mistakes of course, but if I make a mistake today, I probably won't do that tomorrow. Possibly I may choose to disregard some book or other and that may be a mistake, but the next week I will come across yet another book, and so on. But a student of 20 years old, or even of 30 does not have this kind of filtering ability. We have to invent a practice, a theory. A practice or training in decimation.

Well now, how do we do that?

Eco leans forward eagerly in his chair.

Well, it still has to be invented. There must be some rules. There are some very elementary rules such as: control the dates of the bibliography for instance. If you are working on a certain subject you may find many references from 1993 and 1994. But in relation to other subjects finding only references from 1993 and 1994 might be negative, you ought to be finding some older dates.

Exactly.

So if you read a book on Kant and you have only a bibliography from the nineteen-nineties then this is suspect. The author is working from secondary sources. If you are reading a book on hypertext and you find an old bibliography then this is suspect, because every day there is something new about this particular field. So there may be some first, elementary rules you can use in order to isolate certain things immediately.

19 February 2008

A CONVERSATION ON INFORMATION - parte I *(entrevista de Patrick Coppock a Umberto Eco, Fevereiro de 1995)

* (treze anos depois, isto ainda faz sentido?)

A chain-smoking and jovial Umberto Eco receives me in his crowded, untidy but cheerful little office at the Institute for Communication Studies at the University of Bologna. A bay-window opens out onto a tiny balcony overlooking the garden of the villa where the institute has its offices and library. The walls of the office are covered with rows of well-filled bookshelves; a sofa along one wall is full of piles of papers, books and articles, a modest writing desk hidden under even more books and papers. In one corner of the room is an IBM 486 clone with Windows, a new article or book obviously in progress on the screen. Eco offers me a chair in front of his desk. In advance I had given him a list of some possible issues we might discuss so he would have some idea of what was on my mind: computer technology, the Internet community and processes of cultural change. I begin by asking:

Professor Eco, you're a man of letters, a writer, philosopher, a historian. On the desk beside you is a computer. Is modern computer technology actually functional for you as an author and literary researcher?

Eco glances over at the computer, smiles, then nods thoughtfully:

Yes, but sometimes the computer can also give paralysing results. I will give you an example: I was invited by Jerusalem University to a symposium whose theme was the image of Jerusalem and the temple as an image through the centuries. I did not know what to do on this particular topic. Then I said to myself, well OK, I have worked with stuff from the beginning of the Middle Ages; my dissertation was on Thomas Aquinas.

He points to the rows of well-filled bookshelves on my left...

Here I have all the works of Thomas Aquinas with a reasonably good index, and I looked there to see how many times he quoted Jerusalem and tried to say what use he made of the image of Jerusalem. Now, if I only had these books - well, that index is a reasonable index which focuses only on the larger, more intensive treatments of the word 'Jerusalem' - I would have found say 10 or 15 tokens of 'Jerusalem' which I would have been able to examine. Unfortunately I now have the Aquinas hypertext...

He glances again at the computer in the corner...

and there I found, that there were - well I don't remember the exact number - but there were round 11,000 or so tokens...

Oh my God!

Well at that point I quit!

Yes, that's far too much material at one time, obviously.

Working with 11,000 references is just impossible. That's far too many.

So the system you use doesn't 'filter' well enough in other words?

I cannot manage to scan as many as 11,000 tokens. Now, if I had only my old traditional limitations then I would probably have done something more or less reasonable on that particular topic.

That's because the human person who is searching does it in a kind of sensible, intuitive way, whereas the computer just does it in a very mechanical way and just picks out every single example?

My theory is that there is no difference between the Sunday New York Times and the Pravda of the old days. The Sunday New York Times that can have 600 or 700 pages altogether really just contains old news fit to print. But one week is not enough to read a number of the Sunday New York Times. So therefore, the fact that the news items are there is irrelevant, or immaterial, because you cannot retrieve them. So what then is the difference between the Pravda, which didn't give any news, and the New York Times which gives too much? Once upon a time, if I needed a bibliography on Norway and semiotics, I went to a library and probably found four items. I took notes and found other bibliographical references. Now with the Internet I can have 10.000 items. At this point I become paralysed. I simply have to choose another topic.

So information overload and this extreme, non-intuitive selection of information is the main problem?

Yes, we have an excessive retrievability of information. It is neither ironical nor paradoxical, I think, what has happened with Xerox copies.

Eco picks up a pile of papers from the desk in front of him and waves them.

Once I used to go to the library and take notes. I would work a lot, but at the end of my work I had, say, 30 files on a certain subject. Now, when I go into the library - this has happened frequently to me in American libraries - I find a lot of things that I xerox and xerox and xerox in order to have them. When I come home with them all, and I never read them. I never read them at all!

No, same here: you never seem to have the time, do you? Once you know that it is there, you feel reassured, and so you don't read it.

Exactly...

Xeroxing then can paralyse your reading activity? That's another risk?

17 February 2008

"Dave, Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid"

"As chief scientist at market research company Neuroco of Weybridge, England, [David] Lewis conducts similar experiments for global players including Bridgestone, Hewlett-Packard, and some in the food, beverage, and cosmetics industries. The United Kingdom’s first agency built on the nascent science of neuromarketing, Neuroco is at the forefront of a new discipline being touted as the most important breakthrough in marketing research in a generation. The theory is certainly intriguing: by studying activity in the brain, neuromarketing combines the techniques of neuroscience and clinical psychology to develop insights into how we respond to products, brands, and advertisements. From this, marketers hope to understand the subtle nuances that distinguish a dud pitch from a successful campaign.

'There’s a lot to learn about consumer behavior by opening up the black box,' says Harvard University economics professor David Laibson. (...) A self-described embryo in the sprawling $358 billion global advertising industry, privately held Neuroco hopes to parlay its neuromarketing insights into riches. Because neuromarketing is so new — and so potentially creepy — Neuroco’s brandname clients are reluctant to talk about the research they’ve commissioned. (...) But Neuroco is off to a promising start; founded in March, the company has already signed up six multinational clients and established relationships with many of Britain’s largest advertising agencies. (...)

Take insurance — an industry not known for running unnecessary risks. Hired by Royal & SunAlliance, the second-largest U.K. insurance company, Lewis evaluated one of Royal’s 30-second television spots by wiring 60 volunteers with electrodes. Then, shot by shot, frame by frame, Lewis examined the subjects’ EEG readings as they watched the commercial. He discovered that the viewers’ brains were most engaged during the ad’s dramatic action scene, but interest flagged significantly at the tagline, 'You’d better ring the Royal.' 'The results suggested that the catchphrase was unlikely to prove memorable,' Lewis concluded. Royal pulled the spot shortly after the experiment.

To dig out such secrets, Neuroco charges an average of $90,000 per study. And its list of services is growing: the firm will evaluate the subliminal power of colors, logos, or product features. It measures the mental might of music or jingles, the heft of celebrity endorsers, and the most brainwave-soothing designs for store layouts. (...)